


my lady fair

by jdphoenix



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-17
Updated: 2017-09-17
Packaged: 2018-12-30 16:50:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12113040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jdphoenix/pseuds/jdphoenix
Summary: Sir Leopold is on a quest for a miracle.





	my lady fair

**Author's Note:**

> So over on tumblr plinys said you couldn't do historical fraida because there are no robots in the past which is (I'm sorry, dear) complete bullhockey because fraida, as a trope, has existed for 2K+ years, sorry, them's the facts.
> 
> (Also this fic is not set quite that far back - or in any identifiable time period in fact - though I did consider it for a hot minute.)

“No.” That seems to be Lord Radcliffe’s answer for everything. Leopold requires the secret of Radcliffe’s miracle. No. Leopold has been empowered by his king to offer five chests of ill-gotten gold in exchange for said miracle. No. Leopold is in need of a place to sleep because Lord Radcliffe’s home is in ridiculously far from the nearest town. No.

Well, it did become yes, eventually. But Leopold had to stand in the rain shouting for the better part of an hour.

Now all he asks is to say a polite goodnight to his host in person rather than through a locked tower door. No. What a surprise. Immediately the quiet is filled with the crack of a chisel striking stone.

“Please do not take it personally,” Lady Radcliffe says. Far as they are from civilization, it is left to her to escort him to his rooms herself.

“I shouldn’t have expected less from the devil of Derby.” Leopold could bite his tongue. Holden Radcliffe is many things—genius, recluse, madman, possibly a heretic—but throwing that particular bit of slanderous nonsense in his wife’s face is hardly appropriate, regardless of what he may or may not have done. “I apologize. I’m sure your husband was faultless in those events.”

“Of course,” she says pleasantly, her smile as lovely as ever. Radcliffe is most certainly mad, Leopold decides. No sane man would allow a woman as lovely as the Lady Radcliffe to walk alone with another man at night. “Apology accepted. And I do hope you will not hold this against him. He’s working, you see.”

Leopold does see. Before circumstances conspired to turn him into an errand boy, he was a scholar, much like Radcliffe. He does not have his wide array of talents—he’s never much cared for painting or sculpture as Radcliffe seems to—but he knows what it is to spend days at a stretch bent over his papers.

She opens a door that squeals on its hinges and holds out her candle for him to take. “And I’m afraid you are in error, Sir Leopold, Lord Radcliffe is not my husband.” She leaves him—with a musty room to sleep in and her own candle to see by—and makes her way alone in the dark through the winding corridors.

 

* * *

 

“Your wife is quite lovely,” he says the next day when Radcliffe emerges in search of tea.

“She is indeed,” Radcliffe agrees, though his attention seems fixed on the steaming brew in his hands. He drinks it down then sighs out a long breath. When his eyes open, they are sharp on Leopold. “You think so? You do not think her … off-putting?”

Aside from her odd delusion that she is not a married woman, no. But such a sentiment might be taken the wrong way, so Leopold employs Radcliffe’s favorite word. “No.”

Radcliffe hums to himself, his eyes growing distant in a way Leopold well knows means he is considering a deep conundrum. Soon he will likely return to his tower and his work. The time to strike is now.

“It would be a great service to your country if you were to tell me how she remains so lovely,” Leopold says delicately.

Radcliffe blinks. “No,” he says firmly and walks away without another word.

Damn.

 

* * *

 

He asks again in the morning. And the next. And the next. Radcliffe’s answer remains firm.

“You are as irksome as your father,” he says on the fourth day.

Leopold nearly drops his tea.

“You did not know we were friends?”

“My father is dead,” Leopold says. His standard response whenever his father is asked after.

“He never spoke of me?”

Perhaps he did, but not to Leopold. Their conversations were restricted to the subject of disappointment.

“Can’t say I’m surprised. He always was a bastard.”

Leopold does not try to stop him leaving.

 

* * *

 

“My lady?” he asks. He has struggled to keep his distance from the lady of the house as the days have passed. She seeks him out to ask his preferences regarding meals and whether his room is to his liking, but this is the first occasion on which he has initiated their meeting.

She is kneeling in the garden, her delicate hands tearing at the weeds. He can easily mark the narrow swath of earth she has managed to clear. It is rough work, not at all befitting a lady. And yet she beams at him from her spot on the filthy ground.

“Sir Leopold,” she says, her voice warm as the sun overhead. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

Leopold would like to take a seat on the stone bench nearby, but it seems rude. The subject he has come to broach is rude itself but to ask it from a distance… He imagines his mother would suffer a fainting fit on the spot if he dared, no matter the ocean between them.

And so he kneels beside the pile of weeds and meets her eyes steadily. “My lady, I have been reliably told that two years ago you suffered a sudden illness. I have sworn statements from two palace doctors that you lay dead—not deathly ill, but truly _dead—_ for some hours before your husband removed you. And I have come here to find out how, if that is true, you can be alive now, so that I might, God willing, replicate your husband’s miracle to save the princess.” The princess is not dead, not yet if Leopold has any luck at all, but there is not a healer in four kingdoms who has had any hope of saving her. Lord Radcliffe is all that is left.

Lady Radcliffe’s eyes grow sad and she reaches out to rest her hand over Leopold’s on his knee. “I told you the night we met, Sir Leopold, I am not Lady Radcliffe.”

He shakes his head. “I’ve seen your portrait.”

She starts. “That isn’t possible.”

It was difficult, yes, to find confirmation that the woman sharing Radcliffe’s home now is his wife. But there was, luckily, a painting done by one of her childhood friends prior to her marriage. A small watercolor, nothing masterful, but it can be no other woman. It was the only portrait Fitz could find which was not destroyed when Radcliffe’s manor burned down a year after the illness. Suddenly that seems far more suspicious than it did before.

He catches her hand when she tries to pull it away. “I know you died. I haven’t come to harm you or your husband, I only want to know how it was done and I’ll leave for good. You’ll never have to see me again.”

She stares at their joined hands, hers limp in his. Her porcelain brow is wrinkled as though in confusion. “Oh, do not promise me that, Sir Leopold.”

“You won’t, I swear it.”

She tugs her hand away. “Do not swear,” she orders sharply. “And do not ask for things you should not.” She bends over her weedy garden again.

“My lady-”

“Good day, sir.”

Though he hates to, he honors her dismissal.

 

* * *

 

Leopold is nearly asleep when a knock sounds at his door. Lady Radcliffe is there, her hair loose and her curves on sinful display beneath the thin shift she wears.

“My lady, you should not be here.” He backs away, which is, he realizes immediately, a mistake. The last place he should be going is nearer the bed.

“Please,” she says. She holds out her hand, her arm fully extended between them.

He finds, when she looks at him as she does now, that he is helpless to deny her. She could ask him anything at all and he would submit. So he sets his hand in hers as she seems to want and watches as that pleading expression sinks into relief. She wraps both of her hands around his, twisting her palms in opposing directions while he remains trapped in the middle. She draws him closer, holding his knuckles to her cheek.

“My lady,” he croaks. He can feel her breath stirring the hairs on his arm. “Lady Radcliffe.” Her eyelids flutter and he has the absurd urge to kiss them into stillness. His free hand lifts, inching closer to the gentle curve of her hip as he imagines rucking the fabric of her shift up over it. “ _Agnes_.”

She drops his hand and backs away as if burned. Something like betrayal flashes in her eyes before she disappears into the shadows of the hall.

He remains there, still as stone, until the echo of her footsteps has faded.

 

* * *

 

The next morning marks the first on which Radcliffe has joined Leopold for breakfast rather than stopping in for his tea and disappearing. In the dawn light, it’s easy to see how pale and drawn Radcliffe has become, how thin his cheeks, how obvious his bones before Lady Radcliffe wraps a blanket around him.

“Tea,” he snaps at her, his voice round and wet with an impending cold.

A chill set in last night and it could not have been comfortable in that high tower of Radcliffe’s. But it is the lady Leopold worries over. He imagines her bare feet on the stone floors while she made her way back to her rooms and cannot help wishing he had been faster to take hold of her. He could have kept her warm.

But that is wrong, all wrong. She is a married woman, a lady. Bad enough she is married to a madman and has to live out here for fear of being killed simply because she dared live again, he should not wish to multiply her sufferings by dishonoring her.

Radcliffe wipes at his arms, dislodging both the blanket and a cloud of fine dust. “Blast it all, Aida!” he snaps while his wife scuttles over with his tea. She obediently retrieves the blanket and cocoons him in it again.

Though Leopold watches her closely, she does not meet his eye.

“What are you working on?” Leopold asks.

“No,” Radcliffe says. His voice is at least twice as bad now.

“What was that?”

Radcliffe grabs up his tea and his plate, nearly sending both his chair and his wife to the floor as he goes. “You are trying to butter me up so that you can have my secrets. Well you _can’t_ , boy!” He waves his tea so violently that half of it sloshes from his cup. “I want you out of my house before sunset and if I ever set eyes on you again I shall see you hanged.”

Before Leopold can ask what crime he will have committed by simply appearing within Lord Radcliffe’s sight, the man has swept from the room, taking his wife with him.

 

* * *

 

He has brought few items with him. It takes no time at all to pack and he has only to wait for the old man who sees to the stables to ready his horse. The king will be disappointed, but perhaps it is for the best that Leopold leave.

Lady Radcliffe is standing in the doorway when he turns. In the sunlight, properly dressed, she looks … equally tempting as she did last night.

It is certainly best that Leopold leave.

“You wanted to know,” she says. “He’s sleeping. I can show you.”

He drops his meager bag and follows.

It doesn’t occur to him until he’s standing in Radcliffe’s workroom that she meant his most recent project and not the miracle which saved her life.

Fine white dust like flour covers the room, turning what would only be sad into something horrific. The limbs and body parts strewn about the floor could be real, white as everything’s become. Leopold has to touch the arm hanging awkwardly from a rope to convince himself it’s only stone.

“Why would he break it?” he asks, studying the line of a vein.

“Because he didn’t want to see it finished.”

Leopold scoffs. Seems a foolish reason to ruin hard work. He presses his fingers to those caught on the rope. The slight pressure oversets the entire arm and it drops to the floor with a clatter. The head rolls to one side, lolling against a piece of the torso, and Leopold finds himself staring into what are unmistakably his own eyes.

“He’s tried before,” Lady Radcliffe says. She wanders the far side of the room, pulling down sheets to reveal not furniture but more statues. “But none are quite perfect. He’s become convinced the original needs to die first, but the only way to test it…”

“You are not Lady Agnes Radcliffe,” Leopold hears himself saying. It seems the most sensible of all the thoughts in his head and the only one he finds he can voice without wanting to scream.

“He calls me Aida,” she says, and yes, he has heard Radcliffe call her that. He thought it was an endearment, but the way she says it, it might as well be a curse. “It means returned, it means helper.” She wraps her arms around herself as her circuit of the room brings her back to him. “I am not his wife. And I am not his slave.”

“He-” Leopold must swallow past his disbelief. “He carved you from stone?”

She nods once. “He loved her and he longed for her so he fashioned a body exactly like hers from stone. And his longing was enough to make me live, but her body was dead. _She_ was dead.” She holds her arms out between them, staring at them as though they might not be arms at all. “I am only-”

He wraps his hands around her wrists. “You are alive,” he says. It’s a wonder, a miracle. Not the one he sailed an ocean for, but no less remarkable for it.

She presses her hand to his cheek. It’s warm flesh, not cold stone. A smile breaks over her face like an ocean against the shore. “I had not felt it. Not until you.”

His hand finally crosses that distance to wrap around her hip. It too is warm and real and utterly feminine.

“You said you would leave and never return,” she says, “once you knew.”

His throat goes dry. He doesn’t want to go. He doesn’t want to leave this woman, this miracle. He thinks he would gladly die by Radcliffe’s hand if she were only the last thing he saw.

Her nails curl against his cheek. Her eyes grow sad with pleading. “Take me with you.”

 

* * *

 

He stands on the deck of a ship with five chests of ill-gotten gold coins stowed away in the hold. The surf is sharp against his face, but exhilarating. More so is the woman tucked beneath his arm, for whom every sight and experience seems brand new.

“What should I call you?” he asks. She twists in his embrace and her hair catches in the wind, turning into a banner behind her. “You’re not Agnes or Aida. You need a name.”

Her perfect mouth pulls into a frown. “People do not name themselves.”

She’s right about that and he can see the expectation in her eyes. He considers carefully, quickly discarding dozens of names belonging to women he’s known. She is no substitute, no replacement. She is her own.

“Ophelia,” he says, settling on a name he has heard but never known to be used. He catches her hand to kiss her knuckles. “A pleasure, Lady Ophelia.”

“The pleasure is mine, Sir Leopold.” She arches forward to kiss his lips.

He is returning with the miracle the king demanded, but not the cure. And though he feels some disappointment that he has failed in his quest, he cannot be sorry for the outcome.

 


End file.
